Okay, we must allow Jules to have her joke. Where is it? It is the 4^th panel, where everybody is having some kind of vocal group hug and the speech balloon points to Mark, though the text seems to be something the other four would be telling Mark! Trailheads sometimes speak of older strips where dialog balloons on occasion seem to point to the wrong person, or thing. I admit that I was too lazy and tired to look through the backlog of strips, so feel free to add some footnotes in a response. In any event, it seems odd that Mark would be welcoming himself to Herp Hacienda, unless this is meant to be some kind of campy commercial where Mark and crew are actually welcoming us readers to come back. Well, thanks anyway.

Like so many other stories, this one ends with a trunkful of dead-ends and unexplained subplots. We all know what they are, so I won’t waste my time or yours going over them, yet again. Just scroll back through these blogs, if you have the desire and patience.  As for patience, I can’t say I won’t be glad to be shut of those four Herp Hacienda Hippies. But it would have been nice to at least find out what and who the two creepiest characters were. And why the hell they keep lining up, as if they are suspects in a police lineup?

I think many of us will agree that this is not the strongest ending to a Mark Trail story, though it is not much worse, either. Aside from the dodgy animal air check app, this story seemed to be a series of unresolved, random vignettes. I’ve never been a professional comic strip artist, but I’ve played one in my head, and I know that there can be tremendous pressure to put out a 7-day comic strip. In fact, have we not seen other cartoonists these days going on hiatus every so often, content to rerun older strips in order to get away from the pressure? Or, perhaps to catch up? And perhaps Rivera deliberately constructed this story in a way that would mimic or rip some Mark Trail story memes sure to raise the blood pressure of Trailheads. Or, maybe Rivera is just ripping the old-fashioned notion that a Mark Trail story should follow conventional norms.

MOVING FORWARD:

Well, my biggest request here is that Mark gets a chance to do a story for one of the other 7 or so magazines that make up part of the holding company that Woods & Wildlife get rolled into. Let’s see how Mark gets along with a different magazine editor for a bit. And let’s get some more conversations with snakes! Too bad he didn’t try to talk with any snakes at the Hacienda. A missed opportunity, if ever there was one.

Readers who are coming to Mark Trail without a lot of knowledge of the strip’s history could do worse than read the Mark Trail Confidential page of Mark Carlson-Ghost. It is an in-depth review of the strip, its characters, artists, and a lot more. You’ll learn, for example, that Woods & Wildlife magazine had been bought out at least twice before; that recycling old stories and subbing difference characters was a common practice; that under James Allen’s tenure, Mark starting showing a more sculpted physique, Cherry became sexier looking. Mark started getting clumsy and not always winning fights, in spite of his ripped abs. And he was destroying boats as if they were enemy invaders! Carlson-Ghost also has created a yearly summary of major stories and characters, which is linked on the Confidential page. I might have written on this before, but I think it bears repeating.

There appears to be a total lack of reprinting Mark Trail strips. For some twenty years or so we have been seeing (and buying) sometimes lavish reprints of entire runs of vintage comic strips (Peanuts, Popeye, Little Orphan Annie, Dick Tracy, Gasoline Alley, etc.). But where are the reprints of Mark Trail? I reckon that King Features does not believe there is enough public interest; or maybe much of the older art is no longer available or in good shape. Instead, they have recently started just posting old strips online.

Okay, looks like Amy Lee knows a lot of what went on, but still backs up Mark after getting tired of Cricket Bro’s immature and arrogant manner.  I reckon spoiled billionaires are getting to be pretty common these days. Today’s panels were apparently designed to showcase the many faces and emotions of Amy Lee. Now, where is Amy getting these photos from? Mark certainly wasn’t on assignment with his camera. But I wonder if Amy is now going to want a story based on Mark’s adventures in Loony Tunes Land? That would be quite the assignment for Mark, trying to figure out a way to describe the events without criminally implicating himself or his “new friends”.

And this is Friday, folks! There is one more day to see if Mark suddenly transports back to Lost Forest to signal the end of this story, or we buckle down to view another week of Mark sorting things out in California. According to the Mark Trail Confidential page, Mark has been fired more than once in his career. I wonder if he once again gets a pink slip, getting Cherry upset and worried about their finances, since her business also looks like it is in bad shape. Just like old times!

I certainly don’t want to turn this podcast into a one-dimensional snarkfest, which is not only unfair, but unoriginal and boring. Besides there are other sites that handle that well enough! Nevertheless, this storyline is really pushing my buttons.

Panel 1: Mark’s face looks like he’s a daydreaming teen fantasizing and drooling over some Internet babe.

Panel 2: Mark’s head morphed into some kind of pushed-in face, with the wings of Mercury above his ears. Of course, those are his standard “older man” hair lines, but appearing as if they have their own independent identity. And making me wonder if Rivera has been watching reruns of the original “Twilight Zone”, the four Herp Hacienda Oddballs are once again pointlessly lined up against the fence, as if to ensure we haven’t forgotten them from yesterday’s strip. And to date, no explanation for the two goofiest characters on the extreme left and right. I’d certainly keep my kids away from them. Also troubling is that Mark has, for some reason, bonded with these nerds! After all of his discomfort, ineptness, and questionable activities, you’d think he would be satisfied to never come back.

Panels 3 and 4: Amy Lee brings up Cricket Bro, who has been spilling the beans to her about Mark and his new friends. Well, I suppose he might have discovered the connection with Amy Lee, based on Mark’s prior story she published about his family’s business. Nevertheless, she is definitely not looking like the hip, coffee mug-holding, exuberantly mouth-wide-open editor we’re used to seeing. No, indeed! She is clearly upset with what she’s heard. And it appears Mark is trying to downplay his guilt and embarrassment at being caught out once again. I’m betting he wished his gray hair lines really were the wings of Mercury at this point.

Well, Mark. What did you expect!? You got involved in something you had no knowledge of, something completely outside of your wheelhouse. You let personal fears of inadequacy lead you astray and got you to help complete strangers commit likely illegal acts. You never came across any of your traditional crime-busting situations, such as poachers, drug runners, abductions, animal or insect cruelty, or missing pets. You never really came across any criminal activity at all, except for what you participated in. You did not even get a chance to fully bring out your vaunted Fists O’ Justice™. And now, you actually want to come back to hang out with your new friends?! Worst of all, you didn’t get photographs of anything! Amy won’t like that!

Well, if the mission of Jules Rivera is to totally make a mockery of Mark the Pro-Nature Hero and his paternalistic value system, I think she’s done a bang-up job so far. But Mark seems too wrapped up in his sense of self to be too bothered by this. Always the optimist?

One of the pundits on the Comics Kingdom site proposed that the result of Cricket Bro’s phone call was that he buys up Amy’s magazine and gets his revenge by firing Mark. Plausible. I wish I had thought of that.  I think none of this nonsense would have happened had Mark taken the time to talk with his snake friend back at Lost Forest, before he flew out here. But as Gregory Peck told David Niven in “The Guns of Navarone”, “You’re in it now, up to your neck!”

So, Mark’s last night on assignment? Looks like Amy Lee once again called “right on time”, at the wrap of Mark’s adventure (so we must assume). Apparently, Mark has gotten into Cosplay fun at the Herp Hacienda and is wearing a “Walking Dead” mask in panel 1. Or maybe it’s feral hog.

Hard not to notice that Amy Lee’s depiction in panel 3 is quite decently drawn in comparison with Mark’s two images. It’s not as if Rivera could not have drawn a half-length image of Mark in panel 1 instead of that sketchy and flat scene with the too-small figures. Perhaps this is one reason (other than laziness) that former Trail cartoonists liked to use head shots of Mark to fill panels as much as possible.

So, this is Day 3 of the Epilogue, tying up several loose ends. Critics less charitable than I might call this a week of padding the ending to accommodate the entire week, as if Rivera is getting paid by the word, like some 19^th century writer. But do we deserve perfect closure? Do we always find out what happened to that person at the Motor Vehicles Office who rejected your vanity plate slogan? Do we know the fate of that lover we abandoned because she needs to read Tarot cards to decide what to wear for the day? What will those weirdos do after Mark leaves? Do we even care?

Life is full of dead-ends, unexplained absences, and detours. People come and go, many not even speaking of Michelangelo. Life is messy, but stories are expected to make sense and have a clear Beginning-Active Middle-Meaningful End. Yes, stories need to have Endings. You can’t just pull the plug on a story and cut to a scene of Mark leaning against a porch rail as Cherry extols his manliness and professes her undying love and devotion. Rivera seems to be bucking the standard Trail Story ending technique and I’m down with that.

But the biggest black holes are still the so-called antagonists. Where are they? What are they doing? Why did they bother with this entire farce? The entire story still seems like a con. What was the point? How is it that Mark’s childhood nemesis just happened to be the Sugar Daddy for Reptile Man and the Herp Hacienda crowd?

Well, dear readers, looks like Rivera is content to continue this adventure by wrapping up some loose ends. While we might grimace at the less than stellar art that has lately been showing up in this strip, we can revel in the Herp Posse’s self-congratulatory post-game analysis as they awkwardly stand around. The “supporting cast” of Herp Hacienda Oddballs, having fulfilled their pointless and thankless task of being present at the celebration, have once again been relegated to that “Mark Trail Phantom Zone” of isolation previously inhabited by Mark’s family and other characters who might have had something more to offer, but were mysteriously sidelined (e.g. Dirty Dyer).

Reptile Man seems content with things, overlooking the fact that Cricket Bro has been bankrolling him. For that matter, I believe Cricket Bro has also been funding Herp Hacienda. Nobody seems to care about the consequences. Mark’s phone ringer underscores his obvious old-school sensitivity, while he tries to sound like a modern, sensitive hipster. As George Harrison once sang “It’s all too much…”

Well now, to get to the main point:  Who is calling Mark? All kinds of interesting plot possibilities come to mind:

1. Cricket Bro, who still wants to settle scores but may be content to simply offer more lame insults
2. Professor Bee Sharp, who may want a rematch or at least force this crowd to detail his car
3. Diana Dagger, who would like to introduce her foot to Mark’s gonads
4. Cherry, who is brimming with sisterly love, having made up with Violet and forgotten that her company may now be bankrupt
5. Amy Lee of “Teen Girl Sparkle”, who confesses that, yeah, she knew beforehand about Cricket Bro’s involvement and his past relationship with Mark, just like Mark was set up in his prior assignment!
6. Bill Ellis of “Woods and Wildlife”, calling to see if Mark can get him out of the Phantom Zone and back into the strip
7. The insurance company, calling to cancel Mark’s coverage, based on viewing the security video footage posted by Cricket Bro
8. The Florida State Patrol, requesting he voluntarily return to the state for questioning

So many possibilities, indeed! Now, which one do you think it could be? Or do you have a different idea?

Thanks again to Dennis for stepping back onto the Mark Trail Soapbox to wrap up the presumed ending of Cherry Trail’s latest storyline. I was away for the weekend attending (not participating in) a wedding. It was so hot and humid that the responsible people decided to hold the ceremony inside.  Unfortunately, my wife and I got accidentally stuck sitting at a table in front of the giant air conditioning units. No criticism of the families; it’s just how things worked out. But, it was a pretty nice wedding, all the same. Glad we could make it, too.

Speaking of working things out, what do we have here? Ladies and Gentlemen—and those claiming no allegiance to those categories—are we looking at the further emasculation of Mark Trail?  Once again, we have a typical Mark Trail Segque, jumping from hiding out in an all-night farmers’ market to standing in a lineup, er, cluster of weirdos at the Herp Hacienda (BTW, we never did learn why these people are dressed as if they just got back from some costume party or Cosplay convention). Aparna notes this is a couple days after the theft, meaning we have no idea what took place in the interim, or why they are only having their celebration now. Furthermore, where are the ersatz villains? They know where the Herp Hacienda is, after all.

Aparna continues her tunneled focus on how popular her uploaded app is. Mark looks sheepish over his narrow escape from the possibilities of: a) having to fight Diana Daggers; b) getting arrested for theft and fraud; and c) having to face Cricket Bro and admit that he has no #(@)! idea why he took part in this ridiculous invasion, much less fly to California to appear in some still unknown and possibly bogus video shoot. And to really build up his fan base, Mark confesses that the online forums of “Woods and Wildlife” magazine make him have to sit down and fan himself to avoid getting the vapors. “Steady on, Mark! You were the perfect patsy. Now you have even more people who hate you!” And what is he going to tell Rusty when he returns with no autograph of Professor Bee? Should make for an interesting homecoming.

Hey, at least Jules Rivera is catching on to the standard trick for ending Mark Trail stories:  Ignore details and just cut to the reunion (or home) shot. After this, we’ll likely see Mark back home, with a soon-to-be-disappointed Rusty.

On another topic, I, too, have noticed a simplification in the daily strips over time. The extreme flatness and lack of volume in figures and surroundings stands out to me. So do the somewhat clumsy compositions in a few panels, above, especially compared with many of Rivera’s earlier panels. Not that all is lost: The second panel is actually nicely composed. Still, the overall figures look cramped; and that right arm of Mark in panel 1 is painful to look at! I know some critics on other sites have mused whether Rivera is using a ghost-artist now and then to help explain these artistic variations. It seems early in the game for Rivera to do that, and I don’t believe she has any history of using such people.

Still, this can’t be the end of the story, can it!? It’s just Monday! Perhaps this just a red herring Jules is throwing at us. We have five more days of the week to fill. Maybe Rivera will just teleport Mark back to Lost Forest for the rest of the week, where everybody can trade anecdotes of their adventures. Except for Rusty, who still doesn’t have much of a comic strip life. He needs his own version of the Mexican vacation!

Prof Bee Sharp and Diana Daggers continue their incompetent chase-down in their Mustang, somehow always allowing Mark and “his friends” in their Prius a means for escaping. It might be different if their near-catches were actually deliberate and designed to mislead Mark into making a big enough mistake to ensure they were trapped and properly captured on video for an eventual police arrest.

However, it is hard to believe that Bee and Daggers are really “law and order” types, only doing their civic duty to bring the alleged criminals to justice. Diana’s irrational hatred for Mark and Bee’s juvenile fixation on bettering Mark seem more aligned to personal satisfaction than community safety. And what about the supposed master mind, Cricket Bro? I have already pondered his role in this and whether he is the king or the pawn in this off-the-board chess game. Common consensus seems to be that this story makes little sense, that it does little to highlight Mark’s morality, his job, or his self-appointed purpose.  The story is disjointed and does not seem to follow any logical development. The obvious response to this is “That’s how Life is!” Unlike a TV drama or adventure story, our lives do not run in convenient time intervals that have a visible structure. Most of us are reactive to what goes on around us. Life may be habitual, but we have unexpected delays, diversions, short-cuts, and dead-ends throughout our lives.

But that is not what makes a good adventure story or adventure comic strip. As most of us know, so-called “Reality TV” is anything but real, with its manufactured crises, contrived events, and shockingly over-the-top participants. Yet, these shows are popular, though maybe not as popular as they have been. Still, people watch. Perhaps that is what we have here: Mark naively getting involved in a kind of “reality show” filled with odd characters, outrageous scenarios, and melodramatic acting. Perhaps a take on “The Truman Show”, the movie where Jim Carrey’s character ultimately learns that his life is really just part of some big hoax, a world-wide reality show in which he is an unwitting and unwilling participant.

Or not. It could just be Rivera is trying out a storyline with Mark to see how the character can work in an environment for which he is totally unprepared. And the answer would be “Not very well!” So, on with Sunday!

What a surprise: The Roadrunner. I’m a bit surprised that there are no “coyote” jokes here. But Rivera still manages a bit of humor and inventiveness in the title panel, with “Mark Trail” composed of snakes that the roadrunners are preparing to eat. I also noticed that the “sun” shape with the concentric circles in panel 3 are repeated behind Mark in the penultimate panel. Is this just some compositional inventiveness going on? I don’t think there is any symbolism of Mark being some kind of target.

It’s too bad Rivera could not find room to discuss some of the spiritual significance of roadrunners for indigenous tribes in the Southwest and Mexico, or even to mention how their “X” shaped footprints confuse predators (such as the faster coyote) and also provide a sacred symbol to ward off evil spirits. But, there is only so much space here.

So, while Rivera can be accused of stretching Mark’s daily strips into new geometric shapes, she can and does respect the traditional format and purpose of the Sunday panels.

It’s interesting to see these vintage Mark Trail strips being published on Comics Kingdom. A kid Mark gets to know thinks his sister’s boyfriend is involved in poaching and asks Mark for help and advice. Apparently, Mark’s concern with animals must have been at an all-time low, as he only offers non-committal, “don’t-bother-me-kid” words. Mark does not seem willing to get involved and will not even tell the kid if turning the poaching boyfriend in is the right thing to do. I reckon Mark feels this is one of those life lessons the kid must work through on his own. How different that Mark is from our current Mark Trail, ready to jump into somebody (anybody) else’s problems at the drop of a hat, even if it has nothing really to do with animals or Mark. Let’s get to it!

Okay, lots to “unpack here”, as one of the trendy phrases states it. So, the incompetent driving of Diana Daggers allows Mark and “his friends” to once again slip through their net and escape. She finally makes her way to the Farmer’s Market, so she could not have been that far behind; just far enough to not notice which car drove in and parked. I reckon everybody either ducked or bailed out of the Prius in time?

Now, Diana is pissed because the Prius she tried to block with her car somehow scraped her front end? Heavens to Betsy, those cads!! Well, what the hell did she expect, anyway? This reminds me of some writing from the late Jimmie Breslin, writing about New York Mafiosi chasing down a target who gets away, because the Mafiosi kept dodging rain puddles to avoid messing up their imported hand-made Italian shoes.

So here they are, at last in the Market, full of green Priuses (see yesterday’s post for a discussion on the plural form of “Prius”!)! And this is just too much information for Bee and Diana, while Professor Bee shows that he is just as juvenile as Cricket Bro. In fact, they all are. This is like one of those summer high school movies with the wimpy good guys trying to avoid the rich bully and his pals in his expensive car. And how many other dreadful movies or episodes of the 1960s “Batman” TV show did Professor Bee have to watch in order to come up with that really “menacing” threat in panel 4? Perhaps he was in “drama class” in his college days.

Well, now what, Diana? By your own standards (such as they are), if you cannot record the Herp Hacienda Gang in the Prius, or coming out of it, then you have zilch. At this point, those three could simply saunter around, even stand in plain sight in the parking lot; but you would have nothing, Daggers. No direct chain of evidence. Time to cut bait and call it a night.

As a villain, Professor Bee Sharp should stick to his academic pursuits. He’s no Professor Moriarty. And neither is Cricket Bro, for that matter. Mark needs a real flesh-and-blood villain to bring to justice; not a bunch of arrogant California weirdos.

I trust, this time, that we are heading back to Lost Forest to learn more about Cherry Trail and her fight for botanical justice! At least Cherry has a legitimate motivation for her actions!

I mean, could a person look any more desperate and ready to cave!? I think Mark needs another slap upside the head from Killer Bee. Or a Valium. Another thing I noticed is that the interior of that Prius is looking a lot roomier. Wish my Prius could do that. The three “friends” look especially tiny in that Prius in panel 3. Or is this actually a Prius V, Toyota’s SUV version? Still looks too big.

Anyway, against all odds, the “little hybrid that could” once again loses the Mustang and glides into a Farmer’s Market that actually keeps evening hours. That’s another new one on me. Apparently, “cool cats in hybrids” prefer to shop for organic eggplants and homemade tofu at night, after the hoi polloi have left for the day in their American gas guzzlers. Come Midnight, the Prius owners will have left and soon be replaced by members of the Confirmed Cyclists Club who will bike 30 miles to get there and fill their pannier bags.

Apparently that roadrunner is excited enough to take to the air and try to fly, something it is not well-designed to do. Is it trying to avoid an approaching Mustang or just hoping to flee from this story? That is a bit of snark, of course, but I’m sticking with it. Personally, I think they should have driven on until they found one of those Toyota dealerships I mentioned several days ago.

I was going to write a sentence or two about all of the conveniently green cars here, but ran into a question about the plural form of Prius. When we talk, we would simply say “Priuses”, right? But that’s just talk. According to a 2011 article from cars.com (https://www.cars.com/articles/plural-of-prius-prii-not-according-to-latin-experts-1420663174060/), Toyota settled on the faux Latin word Prii. A Latin instructor thought the plural should be either Priora or Priores, based on the fact that Latin nouns have “genders” and different written forms based on grammatical case. Most of you over 40 might remember some of these terms from your English grammar classes, along with possibly the most damaging pedagogical device ever inflicted upon students in order to destroy any appreciation for writing and reading: Diagraming sentences. Anyway, as Latin is no longer the official language of the Western World, we can stick with the plural “English” form Priuses. Sorry, Toyota. Sorry, Caesar!

Do people barely scraping by to pay for food and housing feel like they have freedom? I wonder….So, why should Mark “and his friends” feel any different, since they have not yet been able to shake the Mustang off their tail, in spite of their escape attempts.

I’m sure many of you (to use that phrase somewhat loosely) have watched movies like The French Connection, Jason Bourne, John Wick, and even Fast & Furious XIX, with the white-knuckle car chases that create more mayhem and destruction than driving on the first snow day. Outlandish maneuvers, exploding vehicles, and improbably escapes are ramped up through close-ups, quick editing cuts, and lots of real or artificial speed. Well, folks, this ain’t one of those!

Instead, we have a lot of desultory driving and nudging. No driving onto sidewalks sending pedestrians into the street; no crashing through large windows and conveniently landing in the middle of a shopping mall where customers just don’t happen to be strolling. And still being able to drive on. Then again, this appears to be late night, and everybody with any sense is home watching the chase scenes in Mission Impossible.

I’m wondering if this is meant to be some kind of parody of “Hollywood” car chases. The whole idea of a muscle car (Mustang) pursuing a pokey Prius across highways and through alleys seems preposterous in the sense that it wouldn’t take more than 10 minutes before the Prius was run off the road or pushed into a lamp post. Yet, the Mustang simply cannot close the deal. The Prius keeps slipping through, as if it was actually nimble and had sufficient pickup in its 4-cylinder motor. Maybe Daggers is afraid to cross a solid yellow line. Mark, whose face seems to keep getting worse each time we see him, looks to  his right (though the Mustang is to his left) to warn Reptilionnaire. Somehow and somewhere Reptilionnaire must have graduated from the Advanced Defensive Driving School run by the FBI (or something like that). How does he do it!?

This storyline began back in late March, so we’re just about at the four month milepost. Now, I’m not at all against long stories, as long as they remain interesting. By my quick mental estimate (that is, being too lazy to review all of the dailies), I’m thinking that this adventure has taken up only about 5 or 6 days in the Trailverse. Where do we go from here? Again, I think Mark and “his friends” have to return to the lab and have a showdown with Cricket Bro to bring closure. But I’m also still trying to figure out where the crime or even the dangerous practices are. The programmers got paid for their work. We’ve seen no evidence of “slave labor” or illicit drugs. No phone or Internet scams. No extortion, blackmail, kidnappings, or animal cruelty. Nobody making fur coats. Just Aparna stealing software she doesn’t own.

In any event, this car chase has run its course.  Parody only works for so long before it gets weary. I’m for switching back to Cherry’s storyline now. Either that, or let’s get on with it. Please? And I’ll leave it to you, dear readers, to ponder the significance of that calligraphic swish drawn over top of the bushes in panel 1.

As usual, I’m late to the party. As regular viewers on Comics Kingdom know, and as recently highlighted by Joseph Nebus on his blog (https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/2021/07/13/comics-kingdom-has-vintage-mark-trail-now-and-prince-valiant-for-the-past-18-months-already/), King Features has started republishing old Mark Trail comic strips on a daily basis, starting with the July 13, 1971, where we find ourselves in the middle of a story involving sheep poaching. Mark is working with (or advising) a teenager named Scat (https://www.comicskingdom.com/Mark-Trail-Vintage/2021-07-09). The strip is from the classic team of Dodd (mostly writing); Hill (most of the drawing), and Elrod (backgrounds and lettering). Although old Prince Valiant strips are also being reprinted, I’m thinking King Features may be posting these Trail strips at this time as a kind of damage control to help placate Trailheads who are pretty worked up about the new direction the strip has taken. The reprints are in black & white, as they were originally published, so you will see that the artwork exhibits standard b&w drawing techniques (hatching, cross-hatching, and solid blacks) to define volume and shading.

A good example is the 7/16 strip, with Mark and Scat working in a Darkroom. Now, don’t be confused by the republication dates at the top of each strip.  As far as I’m concerned, while we might view these as “more realistic” or even naturalistic, to me, the characters look stiff, like marionettes…especially Mark. On the plus side, this panel in particular has a nice “woodcut” feel to it.

And frankly, looking at some of the later strips drawn by Jack Elrod, I wonder if Trailheads think this is better art, or prefer it because it is more familiar to them. Some of this stuff looks like bad manga.

Next: When did Mark Trail start getting clumsy and losing fights?

Critics of the current Mark Trail may cry foul (or something worse), but Rivera did not start the trend of Mark getting clobbered and tripping over himself. I believe it was James Allen, at least as far back as 2014. Thanks to this blog (started by Dennis Williams), we can view strips starting from January 2013. So, with our WayBack Machine running, check out December 31, 2014; the epic “Mark stumbles over a cliff to avoid a bear” adventure in April 2014; and the infamous cave adventure of 2016. No, the real question is how far will Jules Rivera try to push Mark’s machismo before he turns into Inspector Clouseau?

But now, on to TODAY’S INSTALLMENT!

Urban jungle!? Well, they must have managed to find a city of some size, it seems. Downtown Palm Springs, perhaps? We finally get a bird’s-eye view of the chase, where the Prius is presumably making lots of quick turns to increase their chances. But the caption is wrong:  Diana Daggers is driving the chase car. That’s been a problem all along. In spite of their inability to catch Mark, suddenly Dianna figures out how to shift and is able race in front of the Prius to cut them off. Swell. Now, how is getting them out of the car going to incriminate them?

Okay, I’ll contradict myself. I have come closer to agreeing with several commentators regarding the haphazardly drawing. Compared with her earlier work, even as recently as March, these more recent drawing are flatter, less tonal, and more exaggerated and roughly drawn; except for the cars. Rivera is likely using reference images from an online resource. That, itself, is nothing new. Cartoonists have been using picture references for many decades.

Diana Daggers looks particularly on edge and getting older by the panel. In panel 3 she looks like Dian’s mom! So, is Rivera under deadline stress to get these strips done? Is she just freewheeling the drawing for some reason? Even her sound effect in panel 4 looks anemic: “STOP!!” in barely visible text. Really? I mean, if this is a power stop, as it seems, it should be a much more dramatic font: Super-Extra Bold. And wouldn’t the sound be more like SCREEEEEECHHH!!

Frankly, this scene looks pretty much like the alley ambush from Monday, seen from a different perspective. So how is this cut-off going to work any better? Or will Reptilionnaire get confused with all of the extra getaway space around him and freeze? From a storyline point of view, I really don’t see where this extended chase offers anything new, but let’s see what Thursday’s installment will show. River has three more days after today to get this story to a meaningful break before we return to Cherry.

Okay, I’ve worn down your patience enough for one day, or maybe two. If you made it all the down here, thanks. if you didn’t, thanks for trying!

I am writing this on Monday morning, before Tuesday gets printed. I’m revising (or correcting) some of my thoughts on the current plot device of the failed car chase. I (and perhaps others) have focused too much on the actual chase and the improbable escape attempt, seeing it only as a silly and amateurish action trope, without considering the point of the chase from a story point of view. Sure, I waxed unpoetically on the need for a really bang-up ending to this story, something that pulls the strings together and makes for a satisfying ending. But I didn’t connect the dots, until now.

What I should have realized is how important the failed attempt to escape is to the story’s conclusion. If Mark “and his friends” actually escaped, what would the ending be? Mark flies home; the Herp Hacienda gang goes back to studying snakes (I think); Professor Bee Sharp and Diana Daggers drive out of the picture in disgust, perhaps to unite with Dirty Dyer where they can forever plot revenge against Mark Trail; and Cricket Bro, now a broken and bankrupt man, is last seen on his knees in the sand of some ungainly beach, extending his arms to the skies and crying out “WHY!? WHY!?” as he is still unable to see he is the victim of his own arrogance and vindictiveness.

Well, that last part might actually happen, but for the rest, it is not a satisfying ending. No, Mark “and his friends” have to get caught so Rivera can properly stage the Big Ending (i.e. the denouement, as literary critics call it) to the story. There has to be a final resolution, like Holmes and Moriarty; Jason Bourne and the CIA; and Martin and Lewis. This might be a new experience for Trailheads who have endured many stories with loose ends remaining forever loose.

Accepting the premise of Rivera’s climatic car chase to drive the story to its conclusion, I make one belated suggestion:  Instead of Sharp and Daggers racing around to the other side of the alley, a better plot solution (Oh, hindsight is always easier!) would have been for the Prius to turn into a blind alley, where the Mustang could then turn back and block any escape. So where will this end?

So, I’m not sure how today’s strip helps or hinders my mini-essay, above. Other than action for action’s sake, where are we going with this chase? Somehow, the gang gets out in front of the muscle car, once again! Diana Daggers must not know how to handle a high performance car, which makes me wonder why Professor Bee is not doing the driving, especially as he is at least not dumb enough to be driving at night with sunglasses on. And it’s his car.

Okay, what do we learn today?

1. Mark is not the tough guy he (or we) thought he was. That should be a slap in the face to veteran Trailheads. We never even saw his Fists of Justice!
2. Aparna finally makes her second car chase debut by stating the obvious, thereby taking over one of Mark’s standard memes.
3. Mark is still under the delusion that they can shake a faster car less than 20 yards behind them, in full pursuit. But given Daggers’ driving, he might have a point.
4. With all the time in the world (in his head) Mark puts his vast knowledge of Nature to work and comes up with another possible escape: We should expect to see a Toyota dealership pop up over the next hill, where the gang will somehow be able to slip into a parking slot and befuddle their pursuers yet again. Of course, Mark came up with the last failed idea, too.
5. The mountain line in panel 1 looks like it is thinking “Yeah, sure!”

Okay, guess we’re staying with Mark for a second week.

In a cinematic or literary car chase, the participants are usually in fairly comparable vehicles, though there are exceptions. Yet there is little doubt about the results of a flat-out race between a muscle car and low-powered hybrid. In the remake of The Italian Job, the crooks changed those odds by getting the engines of their fleet of humble Mini Coopers seriously upgraded to affect their getaway from the surprised cops. So, how does Rivera give the boys a chance in this one-sided chase? Turn left and kill the lights! If they were downtown (wherever “downtown” is), they could employ that trick driving down narrow alleys, making more quick turns, and losing the Mustang in a parking ramp, like they do in action movies. This would be a plausible way to take advantage of the car’s size and nimbleness. But there are no major downtowns available.

I suppose this is where foolishness passes from one side to the other. Having foolishly thought they bamboozled the muscle car, Mark’s next decision is to “Drive out the other end of this alley.” Really!? If that doesn’t sound like a setup, I don’t know what does.

Apparently, “Mark and his friends” did not bother to think that Bee and Diana would` figure out the amazing trick of making a quick left and turning off the car lights. Or to put it in a more positive light (!), it’s good to see that Rivera is not going to let us believe Bee and Diana are total blockheads. To make sure we get that, she added that clever caption in panel 4! And so, the story does not go completely off the rails.

Yes, Sharp and Daggers may be narcissistic sociopaths, but they are not blockheads. No, I think the inhabitants of our little green car have the margin in that department. But to be fair, “Mark and his friends” only had a 50-50 chance of going out the right way; not that it would have mattered much in the end.

But speaking of blockheads, where is Aparna, the instigator of this whole travesty? She is presumably in the back seat, unless she got left behind when the boys peeled out of the parking lot. Otherwise, she has been pretty dang quiet the entire drive. Maybe she decided to take a quick nap on the way back to the safety of the Herp Hacienda (still a catchy name!). Nothing like having a warm, self-righteous moral plane when you want to catch forty winks, I say.

In any event, we may now finally find out what all this hoorah is about with the dash cams, the hidden agenda, and Diana’s dream of turning Mark into kindling wood. But I still want to know: Is Cricket Bro the actual mastermind of whatever the hell is going on or is Bee Sharp the real puppet master here? Looking back, Cricket Bro has been a pretty ineffective villain, at least compared to Sharp and Daggers.

After all this messing about, I’m looking for some kind of surprise ending to this story, Jules Rivera! Don’t let it end in a snooze, as your predecessors liked to do.

Do I want to rehash this past week? I’ll try to do it quickly:  Mark and Friends, having been discovered with their hands in Cricket Bro’s cookie jar (i.e laptop), escaped from the corporate HQ in their hybrid, only to be chased, once again, by Professor Bee Sharp and his hired muscle, Diana Daggers. Daggers has an unexplained, psychotic reaction to Mark, whereas we are left still trying to determine exactly what this whole storyline is about, except for the actual theft of private property by Mark and Company. Racing (if you can call it that) in their Prius along the highway at night, the intrepid band of naïve justice warriors figured out how to get away by simply turning off their car lights and making a left turn…in the dark. Though chasing directly behind the hybrid, Sharp and Daggers somehow lost them. Blogger Joseph Nebus offered a possible scenario on how this could have occurred if the roads were arranged in a certain way; only that Rivera did not have the room or a way to show this, thus making it look downright silly. And Sharp and Daggers looked plain stupid. I’m still open to having this entire story turn out to be a drawn-out bad dream Mark is having. But, moving on….

One thing these Sunday strips do show is how decent an illustrator Rivera can be. She continues to be inventive with her title panels, today’s being composed of bear prints. Sunday panels have a larger format than dailies, so it is easier for Rivera to add detail and colors. As most Sunday strips are printed in color, readers get to see how Rivera uses color, rather than ink, to suggest volume and light. In fact, her Sunday panels are more “painterly” than many other Sunday strips, though there are others, such as Prince Valiant. People who only see the dailies in newspaper black and white may be more disappointed in the art, given that there is visually little evidence of shading, save for black areas.

Otherwise, an interesting subject today:  An “extinct” sub-specie of brown bear. Well, good for raising the public awareness, anyway. Attempts to “re-introduce” this bear into California appear to be centered on so-called back-breeding, cloning, and genetic engineering. After all, if the sub-species is extinct, you can’t simply just drop in any brown (grizzy) bear and call it good. Or Californian.

Still, I’m not sure what the link is between the California Grizzly and, presumably, climate change; or what kind of hope and change Mark refers to. But I’m just a dumb guy from Viginia and open to the suggestions!

Well, I should have glommed on to Daggers’ shades the other day. I mean, who the hell drives at night with sun glasses, anyway!? But, I cannot fathom that Rivera would actually resort to this silly escape trope. “Unbelievable” is right. And I don’t think that the roadrunner is much of a distraction. But, really now. I’ve enjoyed most of the weird story twists and the outrageous characters. But, I bit my tongue at the inept laptop heist; I waited patiently to find out what the hell Cricket Bro’s game plan was; and I sat through another ridiculous video production that never got off the ground. Throughout this story, we experienced one dead-end plot device after another. There’s enough loose strings here to overhaul a tennis racquet.

Meanwhile “Mad Dog” Daggers blathers on about her car dash-cam recording the chase, which is supposed to “catch Mark Trail in the act of his little high-tech heist.” All it will show is a chase, of course. I mean, the heist is already done, so there is no “gonna catch” to do. If they don’t already have a recording of the laptop room and the escape in the hallway, they have bupkis. And is that what this whole charade at the Cricket Bro office was about?

I see no reason to spend much time pointing out all of the obvious holes and weaknesses in today’s installment. I will say this:  Diana’s losing Mark would be more believable if Professor Bee was not also in the chase car. This is like one of those jokes from the 1980 “Police Squad” TV series with Leslie Nielson. Except Mark Trail is not a sitcom, I think. (By the way, if you have not seen “Police Squad”, go out of your way to watch it. Try your public library. It’s far funnier than the movies they later made.)

As I have noted several times, I give a lot of credit to Rivera for taking chances and investing the characters in more complex and sometimes outrageous stories. There is, indeed, humor to go around, but normally the kind that Rivera deliberately constructs. Unless, of course, this current sequence with Mark is meant to be some kind of parody, perhaps of movie car chases? Are we to take this “escape in the dark” as a serious plot device or a symbol of the absurd? Are we supposed to laugh in a smug, cynical way at the ineptness of Bee Sharp and Diana Daggers for losing a car that was not more than 10 yards in front of them? Or do we chuckle at a satirical take on car chases?

It may very well be that Rivera has revised a serious adventure strip filled with serious protagonists and melodramatic villains into a satirical adventure strip, filled with protagonists who bumble and stumble their way to victory (like Inspector Clouseau) against nefarious, if comical, villains. I’m okay with that. But please, Jules, let’s at least have some reasonable guidelines in the stories.

And, to think:  We leave Mark’s story suspended for a week while we return to the continuing adventure of Cherry Trail: One Woman’s Fight for Botanical Justice.

Now, somebody please tell me what that white bit of something is, coming out from under the chase car in panel 4. Doesn’t look like a rock or even a deployed airbag, losing its air. Perhaps it’s the roadrunner zipping under the car.

There is are several contradictions or, perhaps, inconsistencies, in today’s strip. As far as the story goes, it isn’t going very far or very fast. The cars in the first panel look more like they are parked than involved in any kind of chase. Even the jackrabbit is looking at us, as if to say…well, you know what. He doesn’t seem to be worried about his safety!

Now panel 2 shows Reptile Man and Mark clearly under stress driving their pickup; I mean , the hybrid. I reckon Aparna decided to take a nap or just lie down to avoid getting hit by any stray bullets.  In any event, panels 3 and 4 look more like two dudes taking a Sunday drive, not fleeing for their lives. I mean, Reptilionnaire isn’t exactly acting like he is about to be run off the road, much less keeping his eyes on the road. And with being chased, how does he have the time or ability to engage in clever “Buddy Comedy” banter with Mark? Oh, that’s right: Comic strip!

Now, what kind of plan is that, Mark: Take a quiet side street and cut the lights!? That is what you do when you have a big enough lead on the pursuer that they lose sight of you for a few moments. From here, it looks like the Mustang is about 5 yards behind the Prius! I don’t think your deception would work, even if you turn your car lights off first, before making your turn. Maybe you can just drive until you see a train happening to approach a street crossing, whereupon you can time your driving to just beat the lead engine without giving the Mustang enough time or room to continue. Of course, that dux ex machina stuff works in movies. No reason it can’t happen here, ya think? And remember, folks,, this is the Land of Absurdities (“LA”).

In spite of all that, the drawing is pretty good, overall, given the characteristics of Rivera’s style. However, I cannot give her much credit for drawing a foreshortened face from the lower side this time (see Tuesday’s strip featuring Aparna’s face). Mark’s stressed face in panel 4, including his “winter mitten” left hand, is just whack. Yeah, it’s easy to criticize. But I recognize how tough it is to produce a daily comic strip, especially one that must carry a continuing story line.  I reckon the point is that comic strips are digestible, meant to be quickly consumed before moving on. Still, that panel 4 just doesn’t make the grade.

And I still miss Mark’s animal conversations. With all of the fauna we’ve observed, you’d think a few words would have crossed back and forth. For example, Mark might have convinced one of the hares to attract a coyote to pursue it across the road, directly in front of the Mustang, forcing it to stop or run off the road. Well, I put it to you: Is that idea any more goofy than what we’ve already seen?

Sorry for the cliché, but I’m in a hurry this morning.

Well, even a bird’s eye view (which appears to be some kind of a parrot drawn in some weird perspective) cannot save us from the dreaded déjà vu of another car chase. But I don’t follow. If the concern here is “catching Trail on camera”, why the chase? Perhaps the answer—such as it is—lies in panel 4, where Daggers illogically, and without reason, threatens to make good on her earlier threat to pound Trail if he so much as touches Professor Bee Sharp. The lady has some issues. I mean, this would make some sense if she was angry at another woman she perceived as a threat to her relationship with the Professor.

Now, this is a rather ridiculous position to take, given the earlier session in the boxing ring. And as I recall, Diana was a fairly quiet and reserved observer. She certainly didn’t blow her top in homicidal rage when Trail got in a few licks of his own. And why wouldn’t she have gotten mad at the very idea of a boxing match?

Perhaps we have some unrealized and unsolvable story conflicts here that Rivera is going to have to resolve by having an enraged Daggers make one too many power turns and overshoot a dangerous hairpin turn on the equivalent of Deadman’s Curve. If we include that earlier image of a rat (presumably more) eating network cables and somehow ruining the security cameras, then an unfortunate crash saves Mark from likely jail time and helps Rivera find a convenient ending to this story.

But, if they do catch up with Mark, would he hit a woman, even in self defense? Would he have done so in his former incarnation? I could not find an example, but it certainly goes against the old-fashioned morals of Mark and our mythic heroes of stage, screen, and print. Yet, our neo-Mark Trail is a deliberate 180, a kind of anti-hero more in the “Man with No Name” mold. Speaking of which, John Wick did not shy from fighting women; but it might be poor optics in a family comic strip for Mark to cross that line. Better that the muscle car cross a warning line on the highway and meet a tragic, if romantic, end.

Looks like we have hares a-plenty (or are they jack rabbits?) out here in Californian desert country. I’m wondering what that video is Diana Daggers was talking about and how it has anything to do with catching the Prius while it drives down the only accessible road out there in the middle of nowhere. It’s not as if they can suddenly take the second left onto La Brea Avenue, a hard right onto Olympic, and the first right on South Detroit. At least the hares were wise enough to remain up and out of the way of these maniacs.

“Looks like they’re home free”, the caption brings up? Really? When was that ever a possibility, given they were caught red-handed, probably captured on security video, and certainly left enough fingerprints to satisfy even a pre-teen wannabe-detective. Yes, folks, that was me when I was around ten, walking around the house with my tube of talcum powder and my mom’s mascara brush, trying to dust for prints on every surface I could find. How successful was I? Let’s just say police work did not become part of my adult life, except for watching cop shows.

Well, are we going to have a repeat of the earlier chase-down? Or is there going to be a surprise inside this time? Perhaps we’ll see Cricket Bro behind the wheel or riding shotgun. Anything is possible, and I sure hope so!

I’ve yet to determine what illegal or anti-Nature action has taken place here, much less where Professor Bee and Diana Daggers fit into this scene. It all seems so out of Mark’s normal wheelhouse!  Why is he even involved in a plot for which he has no real knowledge, likely has illegalities attached to it, and offers him no significant outcome? All this just to get even with Cricket Bro!? Or does he think the readers of Teen Girl Sparkle will eat it up? Hope he got some pics, this time, but it looks like he has retained the prior Mark Trail’s propensity for not bothering with his Leica. Hell, even Spiderman used to set up his own camera to take pictures of his fights for publication!

Well, if Mark has any brain cells left, he’ll just have his ersatz friends convey him directly to the airport so he can catch the first flight back to Lost Forest, whereupon he can gape at Cherry’s equally crazy solutions to her problem. They can laugh at each other’s silly decisions. Maybe an eavesdropping Rusty will think “Dang! My parents are real blockheads!”

Day 2 of the “Wha’ happened!?”explanation. I’m going to take a stab at it and propose that Aparna’s two-day “seminar” is a sequence that got left out of the original escape sequence shown two weeks ago. And Rivera is now “backing up” the time to catch us up. Maybe. Still, Aparna might find it easier to push that hood all the way back to make sure she can be heard clearly, especially as we have two days of panels essentially saying the same thing. Sort of.

However, we have a bit of an information flub. Data aggregators are concerned with managing large amounts of raw data and producing quantified summaries. Handling binary programming code in not their function. They are basically large-scale data warehouses on steroids. So: Uploading Aparna’s programming code to a “coding forum” is reasonable. Then it would be considered “open source” for any programmer to compile or even modify. At that point, the compiled program could be made available to the public for the purpose Aparna wanted.

Data aggregators, on the other hand, would be used to store data recorded by Aparna’s program as it would be uploaded by users. The summary data could then be used for further study. Maybe Rivera has Aparna is simplifying the explanation for Mark, if we want to give this flub a positive spin. Or, maybe she wants to make Aparna not as smart as she thinks she is. maybe somebody gave her some bum data. To be fair, maybe I am all wet.

The third panel showing Aparna’s face from slightly below is nicely depicted, something that Rivera’s predecessors tended to avoid trying, as I recall. However, Rivera seems to still be working out the details for drawing animals. That hare in panel 4 could be a yard statue.

As Quick Draw McGraw used to exclaim during a crisis, “Now hold on there!” What do we have here, if not some kind of chronological and textual revisionism? This is one reason why more time should be spent on each of the two story lines, before switching between them. If we go back a week, we should recall that the Herp Hacienda Heisters had taken the laptop and set off a security alarm. They were intercepted in a hall by Cricket Bro, only to have himself intercepted and restrained by Mark. By the magic of The Cartoon Universe, Aparna suddenly uploaded her app to the Internet before handing the laptop back to Cricket Bro. Mark and his two companions then ran out of the building while Professor Bee and Diana Daggers consulted some kind of tracking program as a substitute for physically chasing them down. Or so it seemed, based on the actual published strips.

However, today’s strip must be a parallel universe redo that altered the time and sequence of events. Mark seems to have forgotten that hallway scene with Cricket Bro. And Mark’s exclamation of potential failure in panel 4 seems to suggest he wasn’t paying attention as Aparna uploaded her app while berating Cricket Bro, who was still being held by Mark! So, where the hell was Mark’s mind during all this? Was he still thinking that he should get back and thrash Killer Bee some more?

And why do we see rats in panel 1 gnawing on what appear to be network patch cables? Is this supposed to create a spark that starts a fire and totally engulfs the building in flames? Does this mean that a fleeing Mark Trail will spot the fire and force the gang to turn around and run back into the building to save whoever manages to get stuck inside before they are potentially asphyxiated or turned into charcoal briquettes? Maybe these cables link to the building’s security system? Mystery abounds!

The art seems a bit uneven. The first panel appears to depict our protagonists as stick figures in clothes, whereas the other three panels are filled with more conventionally decent Rivera drawing. Lest anybody be unsure, I generally like her drawing. However, I am not so comfortable with the first panel. I have proposed a theory in the past that suggested certain elongations or distortions might be deliberate stylistic choices to represent high energy, action, speed, or other dramatic events. And in truth, it is only Mark—who is running—who looks rather stick-like. But I may be reading too much into this. That comes from my unfortunate academic background, I think.

Anyway, I’m okay with a bit of a recap, but not if it is going to alter the chronology and events.